Leaves (16 page)

“Kind of a professional prerequisite. Here, let's go sit down. Do you want something to drink?”

“No, I'm good.”

Tyler gestured her over to the couch. Patrice waited until he sat down and then sat across from him in a chair. She looked uncomfortable.

“You okay?” he said.

She pursed her lips together and then locked eyes with him. “I don't want to marry you.”

The directness startled him. “You don't?”

Patrice lowered her head and then looked off to the side. “I don't, Tyler.” She made eye contact again. “I love you. I feel things for you that I've never felt for anyone else. But I don't feel that I want to be your wife.”

Tyler leaned forward and held up his hands. “Look, I just blurted it out. It was crazy of me to do that. It was way too soon after we'd gotten back together.”

Patrice sat back in the chair as though she were retreating from him. “That's not it. If it were, I wouldn't be telling you like this, saying things this bluntly. Tyler, I'm not ever going to want to marry you.”

Tyler was finding it hard to wrap his mind around this. He couldn't think of anything to say.

“What's been happening between us is a rebound,” Patrice said.

“A rebound?”

She nodded. “I started dating someone a couple of weeks after you and I split. It was very intense – very intense – for a short period, and then it ended badly. That happened only two days before you came into the store. I saw you, I remembered what a good guy you are, and all of this unexpected affection came pouring out of me. And it felt great, you know? Caring for you was never an issue. I really enjoyed the two of us being together again. When you asked me to marry you, though, it forced me to think about how I saw our future – and I just don't see us as a forever thing.”

Tyler continued to be dumbstruck. He thought he knew Patrice so well. How could he have possibly been unaware of how she was feeling?

“Do you hate me?” she said.

Tyler realized that he was looking far past Patrice and out the window behind her. He shifted his focus back to her.

“I don't hate you. I can't hate you.”

She smiled ever so slightly. “I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to try.”

“Yeah,” he said weakly. “Maybe later.”

“I'm sorry, Tyler. I never should have done this to you. I should have been more able to keep my wits about me, especially because it was affecting you.”

All he could do was look at her. She was still as gorgeous as ever to him. This would have been so much easier if he could see her as ugly.

Patrice stood, walked over to him, and kissed him on the top of the head.

“I'm gonna go. Let's talk in a few days, okay?”

When he didn't respond immediately, Patrice kissed him on the head again. Then she turned and walked toward the door. Tyler continued to look out the window behind her chair until he heard her car back out of the driveway.

It wasn't as though it was the first time Corrina had had a door slammed on her. Still, for some reason Ryan's doing so as he stormed out of the house after dinner continued to bother her nearly two hours later. He'd been uncommunicative at dinner, which was hardly unusual, but Corrina couldn't help think that he was being so quiet because he was hiding something. She hadn't wanted to believe her brother when he said he'd caught Ryan
in the act
, but the reality was that Tyler really didn't have any reason to invent that, and she had recently seen Ryan with his arm around a girl and had that awkward conversation with him about it. Tonight, she thought the questions she'd asked her stepson while they were eating were innocuous enough, even though she was asking them to pick up some clues. He answered them increasingly sharply, though, and finally threw down his fork, pushed back aggressively from the table, and stomped out the door.

As the echo of the slam reverberated through the house, Gardner turned to her and said, “I assume that wasn't what you were going for.”

Corrina looked down at her half-finished meal. The snapper had seemed so appetizing when she bought it this afternoon. Now she'd lost interest. “You're gonna have to handle this.”

“I didn't realize there was anything to handle.”

Corrina hadn't mentioned Tyler's allegations to her husband, not wanting to add to the family-wide tensions that already existed between her household and her brother.

“I think bolting on us in the middle of a meal and slamming the door on the way out qualifies as something to handle.”

Gardner started eating again. “At Ryan's age, I think a certain amount of acting out comes with the territory.”

It dawned on Corrina that Gardner would have had an entirely different reaction if Ryan's anger had been directed at him. Saying anything of the sort was simply going to leave another member of the household pissed at her, though, so she held her tongue. Ten minutes later, dinner was over, and Gardner was back in his office working on a case. At least he bothered to mutter something about having some free time this weekend. And he didn't slam the door.

As it turned out, Corrina had plenty to take care of herself tonight. She had to follow up on the VIP invitations for the party, and she'd promised the Visitors Bureau that she'd do some maintenance of the bureau's website in preparation for the switch in focus from fall foliage to the holiday season. This kind of work often distracted her when something wasn't going right at home, but it wasn't doing so right now. She kept flashing back to Ryan's expression just before he got up from the table. It didn't say
you're getting me very angry
; it said
I don't need to take this crap from you
. It wasn't necessary to remind Corrina that she didn't have any leverage with her stepson. What would she do, though, if Ryan actually started treating her as though she were completely irrelevant to his life?

She heard Gardner's office door open and the sound of his footsteps heading toward the kitchen. She thought about meeting him there to reopen the conversation, making it less about Ryan's abrupt departure and more about her concern over his recent pattern of behavior. She thought twice about this, though, because Gardner could be so distracted and irritable when she tried to get him to think about anything other than a case while he was working. A minute later, she heard him return to his office and close the door.

Corrina tried to focus on the Visitors Bureau site, attempting to decide how to feature the various Thanksgiving events occurring in the area. However, for whatever reason, sitting alone in her office left behind by the two men in her home, she couldn't get her thoughts to extend beyond the end of October.

A few minutes later, she shut down the computer. Considering the direction in which this day had gone, heading to bed was probably the best option.

Tyler stood up from his desk, rubbed his eyes, and went into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. He guessed that he'd been staring at the image on his screen for a half-hour straight while he tweaked values, adjusted colors, and performed all the other subtle manipulations he brought to each of his photographs before he started printing. The challenge was always to enhance the natural without crossing over into artificial.

Sitting on the couch, he shut his eyes. When he was in a heavy work session, he found that doing this for a few minutes every couple of hours kept his vision sharp. Then he rose, rolled his neck a couple of times, and headed back to the monitor.

The image he was working on was of a carpet of fall leaves against a rise in the park. From the angle he'd chosen, it appeared that the leaves went on for miles. The only thing to break up the expanse was a tiny sliver of street in the upper left corner. Looking at that spot now, Tyler noticed a bicycle that he'd somehow missed before. It didn't surprise him that he hadn't seen the bike in the shot because his eyes naturally fell on the array of color that filled most of the screen.

Looking more closely, Tyler saw that the bike had a child seat strapped onto the back. It looked a lot like the bike Deborah used to take him for rides on when he was a little kid. Tyler didn't remember much from his preschool days, but he had very clear memories of the wind on his legs when they sped down the hill around the corner from the house. He'd squeal as they made their descent and immediately start begging Deborah to do it again when they got to the bottom.

Tyler remembered doing this with his sister from spring through fall when he was four. Deborah was an incredibly good sport about it. The spring after he turned five, though, it nearly ended with a bang.

It was the first warm day of March and Tyler immediately started campaigning Deborah for a ride. He must have gone through a growth spurt over the winter, because Deborah remarked about how much heavier he felt on the back of the bike, and she definitely seemed to be having a harder time getting up the hill. Going down, though, would turn out to be more problematic. As they picked up speed, Deborah must have noticed something in the road, because she shifted the front wheel quickly. The now-heavier Tyler threw her off balance, and suddenly the bike went crashing, Deborah flew out of her seat, and the strapped-in Tyler skidded along the road. Tyler remembered being shaken up, but he didn't feel frightened or hurt until he saw Deborah get up with a bloodied knee, look at him, and start screaming. That's when he noticed there was blood running down his face and into his eyes, and his arm was bleeding too. Deborah unstrapped him, hugged him to her chest, and ran with him all the way back to the house. There was quite a bit of blood, but all of Tyler's injuries were superficial. Mom patched them both up and they didn't even need to go to the doctor.

That didn't stop Deborah from being horrified by the experience. She spent the entire evening alternating between crying, checking on Tyler's wounds, and apologizing.

The next afternoon, Tyler asked Deborah if they could go down the hill again. Deborah immediately got tears in her eyes.

“I don't think we should, babe,” Deborah said in an unusually high voice. “I almost really hurt you yesterday.”

Tyler remembered his head dropping at that point. As he studied the floor he said, “So we can't go down the hill anymore?”

Deborah knelt next to him. “I just don't want to hurt you.”

Tyler looked into her teary eyes. “You don't hurt me. You take care of me.”

Deborah hugged him close at that point, pinning his tender arm. Now
that
hurt, but Tyler definitely didn't want to say anything about it.

Mom wouldn't let them ride that day, but they were back on the hill two days later, and they went down it dozens of times that year. The next year, Tyler was old enough to race Deborah down the hill on his own bike, something they kept doing until Deborah went off to culinary school. It was their thing.

Tyler realized he'd lost focus on the image on his monitor. He examined it again now. Doing so, he realized that the vehicle on the upper left corner of the picture wasn't a bike at all. It was a motorcycle.

Maybe it was time to get away from the computer for a while.

Spurred by Olivia's encouragement, Maria had spent every minute that Doug wasn't around working on her four-song set for the show at Mumford's. She knew she wanted to do a James Taylor song, but picking one required playing dozens from his songbooks to choose something that felt and sounded the best. She figured she would do the version of “Least Complicated” that Martha liked enough to ask her to be in the show originally. She also wanted to do something not usually associated with acoustic performers, and had been auditioning everything from Earth, Wind & Fire to Nine Inch Nails to Coldplay.

For the fourth song, Maria decided she wanted to do something original. It wasn't that she thought she was in the same league as these other songwriters, but if she was going to perform for people for the first time in years, she wanted to do at least one thing that was distinctly hers.

What song, though? As she flipped through her songbooks, everything seemed either too personal – lullabies for Olivia, mostly – or too derivative. She didn't want to do an original song only to come off as an imitator. She tried tweaking a chorus here or a chord change there, but none of the improvements seemed substantial enough.

I'm going to have to write something new
, she thought. This made all kinds of sense to her. She'd evolved so much as a person over the years. Surely her lyrics would be more sophisticated now, as would be her sense of how to build a song.

Maybe she would write something for the Halloween party as well. She'd done this sort of thing for special family occasions in the past, major anniversaries, birthdays, and other events. She could play it toward the end of the night, giving the evening an emotional sendoff and the future an appropriate start.

She picked up her guitar, spent a moment tuning, and then tried out various combinations of chords and fingerpicking styles. Though she considered her lyrics to be the most important part of her songs, she always started with a melody. She also knew from experience that the first hour or so of noodling would net absolutely nothing of value.

With less than a week before the show and only nine days until the party, she didn't have any time to waste.

Maybe this is how you're supposed to feel
, Deborah thought as she walked from her car down Hickory.
Maybe queasiness is part of the process.
She realized as she started driving toward Sage's shop immediately after getting off the phone that she had no reference point for this.

Sage was setting up a display along the left wall when Deborah entered the store. He stopped when he heard the door open and started walking toward her when he realized who it was. He must have noticed how skittish she was feeling, because his expression changed from one of welcome to one of concern just before he hugged her.

“What's going on?” he said, still holding her close to him.

“I told River Edge I'd take the job.”

He pulled back, still holding her shoulders. “Hey, that's great.”

“That's what they said.”

“It is. Right?”

Deborah took a step away and sighed. “It is, I know. It's a great restaurant, a great kitchen, and they're going to let me do whatever I want. And the pay is good, which means I won't have to dig into my savings while I'm looking around. So why do I feel like I just got into my safety school?”

Sage chuckled softly. “Because that's exactly what happened.”

“But they're
all
safety schools. That's the thing that's making me crazy.”

Sage reached out for her hand and moved her toward the display he'd been setting up.

“These arrived today,” he said, handing her a bottle of scotch bonnet ketchup. Deborah looked at the label, a lovely line drawing of vines and vegetables. Then she examined some of the other items on the shelf: a curry mustard, a persimmon relish, a passion fruit chutney, an apricot salsa. “They're made by a woman in the Finger Lakes. A few years ago, she was running a food truck selling artisanal sandwiches. The artisanal part came largely from the homemade condiments she put on them. Rather than expanding her catering business, she decided to start selling the condiments instead.”

Deborah found this fascinating. “She gave up the food truck?”

“She had to. This is ramping up very fast. When I spoke to her at the fair, she told me that she's already in twenty-three states.”

Deborah reached for the chutney and read the statement of purpose on the back of the jar.
Adding new tastes to time-honored favorites
….
Co
m
plete dedication to the fullness of flavor
. Deborah had the feeling she would like this person. Maybe she would go with Sage to the next food fair he attended. If she could get the time off from the River Edge.

Sage took the jar from her hand. “Isn't this what you should be doing with your sauces?”

He completely surprised her with the suggestion. “Bottle sauces?”

He put the jar back on the shelf. “Your sauces are uniquely yours and people travel from all over to taste them. We could get the food blogosphere talking about this in ten seconds.”

Deborah put a hand up to her nose, still trying to reconcile something so completely different from what she'd been considering for her next career move.

“There's nothing ‘safety school' about it,” Sage said.

She glanced over at him, and a smile blossomed on her face. “There isn't, is there?”

“Nothing in the least. You could fail spectacularly.”

“I could,” she said, her smile broadening. She gazed skyward and then looked toward the door. “They're going to be so furious with me when I tell them I'm not taking the job.”

“They'll get over it.”

Tyler had surprised himself with his reaction to losing Patrice, especially since there was little question that it was final this time. There was no way back for them after what she'd said to him. Still, less than a minute after her car had backed down the driveway, he was back at his computer, working on images. First, he cracked the code on the Rhode Island shots and then he started refining photos he'd left unfinished for a year or more. He didn't even stop to go to the bathroom until two thirty in the morning, when he finally left his studio for the night.

Whatever had spurred that burst of productivity was absent today, though. He didn't get out of bed until after eleven, and making coffee easily took him ten minutes. At this pace, he wouldn't be showered until Saturday.

Sitting with his mug at the dining room table, he could see the couch where Patrice had kissed him goodbye. He'd known that his marriage proposal had not gone well, even if he'd been a little reluctant to acknowledge it consciously. He'd even prepared himself for Patrice suggesting to him that they set the conversation aside for the immediate future. He might have even been fine with that, as long as it didn't become an issue between them.

If he hadn't asked Patrice to marry him, would they have kept going the way they had been going since their reunion? Did he inspire her departure – and her candor – by raising the bar? Or had he merely hastened the conversation by a week or so? Maybe Patrice had already had it in her head that she was going to end things without committing to a timeline.

Tyler realized that this kind of conjecture didn't matter, even though he couldn't prevent himself from continuing with it. Right now, nothing seemed like a better option than sitting at the table, staring at the couch, and wondering about alternative ways in which Patrice might have dropped the bomb on him.

Tyler's cell phone started playing his ringtone, the opening notes from Fun.'s “We are Young.” For a split second, he thought about letting the call go to voicemail, but curiosity prevailed, even in his torpid state.

The call was from an area code he didn't recognize, and the number was one he didn't know. Having already expended the energy to rise from the table to see who was trying to get in touch with him, he decided to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hi, I'm looking for Tyler Gold.”

“That would be me.”

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Tyler. My name is Joe Elliott, and I run the Aperture Photo Gallery in Columbia, South Carolina. First of all, let me tell you how much I love your work.”

Tyler shook his head briskly at the incongruity of this call. “Did you say you're from South Carolina? How did you even see my work?”

“From your site, of course. Beautifully designed, by the way.”

“Yeah, I figured you saw my stuff on the site, but how'd you find the site in the first place? Don't tell me that search engine optimization thing I did actually worked.”

The man on the other end of the call chuckled. “I don't know anything about that. A gallery owner in Silver Spring, Maryland told me about you.”

Tyler had no idea how the guy in Silver Spring knew about his work either, and he assumed that asking Joe Elliott was pointless. “Well, thanks.”

“I'd like to talk to you about my carrying some of your photos in my gallery.”

“Really? You think there's a market for pictures of New England leaves in South Carolina?”

“I think there might be a good one. There are only so many photos of palmettos you can sell.”

Tyler hadn't once considered this kind of merchandising possibility. He'd always assumed that the only market for his current work would be relatively local and that he'd have to change his style if he wanted a broader reach. It hadn't occurred to him that people might gravitate toward his images precisely because they
weren't
local.